Category Archives: National Campaign

UCU national workload survey

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UCU are running a national survey on workloads.  This is an issue that members frequently raise with the local branch with excessive workloads leading to work-related stress and absenteeism.

In order that we can understand more about workloads across the education sector, could you please complete the 2016 survey; it should take around 10-15 minutes and can be accessed via this link:

UCU workload survey 2016 

Everyone who completes the survey will go into a prize draw for a £100 John Lewis voucher.  Please feel free to forward this email to any interested colleagues who may not be UCU members.

Summer casework: why we all need to be in UCU

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Over the summer, we have been approached by several university employees who have needed independent support and advice. The University regulations allow union caseworkers to support employees in a variety of situations, and generally the independent support provided by union is very well received. In some cases, they were long-standing employees who had just joined the union because of their problem. In others, they were non-members who approached us asking “if I join, what can you do for me?” Yet other non-members asked if they should hire a lawyer.

These approaches all suffer from a lack of understanding of the university’s (and most other employers’) processes. Let’s deal with them one by one.

Can I join if I have a problem?
Yes, you are very welcome to join at any time. The union would, however, be completely unable to balance its books, or supply volunteer caseworkers, if large numbers of staff were allowed to join, and pay membership, only while they have an employment issue. The union’s legal service imposes a strict, but short, waiting period on new members before offering support. Similarly, within the branch, we are unlikely to be able to offer support for pre-existing issues with new members.

If I join, what can you do for me?
As I say above, we can support you with your next problem. We may be able to offer informal local assistance with your current difficulties. All the while, you will be helping to improve pay and conditions for all of us.

Should I get a lawyer?
This is the big misconception. A lawyer will be of almost no use to you until it is too late. You can take your problem to him or her, and they can offer you advice. But they cannot accompany you either to an investigation or to a disciplinary hearing. You will be on your own. And they probably will not know much about local conditions at the university. Your lawyer can come to an employment tribunal, but by then, after you have been sacked, it is almost certainly too late. Even if you win, you will almost certainly not be reinstated. The chances of winning are about fifty-fifty; if you win, you can expect a cash settlement of perhaps several thousand pounds†, but no job to go back to.

Almost all of the good outcomes we achieve for members are the result of dedicated work by our trained team of volunteer caseworkers. They meet with members and come to investigation and disciplinary meetings. Their accreditation training is supplemented by wide experience of what actually happens at Southampton. And, within the limits of confidentiality, they share experiences at regular meetings. In most cases, we are able to prevent problems escalating. For the more intractable cases we can call on paid union professionals, who (unlike lawyers) are also entitled to come with you to meetings. Finally, if all else fails, we are able to offer support at a tribunal. But, as I said, by then it is probably too late to keep your job. Here is what the university writes:

The member of staff has the right, if they wish, to be accompanied by a workplace colleague or a trade union representative.

The representative/companion is permitted to address the hearing in order to put forward the member of staff’s case; they can sum up the case and respond on their behalf to any view expressed at the hearing.

The representative/companion is also permitted to confer with the member of staff during the hearing.

It should be noted that the representative/companion has no right to answer questions on behalf of the member of staff, to address the hearing if the member of staff does not wish him or her to do so, or to prevent the employer explaining its case.

Representatives/companions have an important role to play in supporting a member of staff and are allowed to participate as fully as possible.

There are other important reasons for you to be in the union. If, say, a student complains about you, you will be judged according to the university’s policies. University HR won’t be much help; their role is to protect the institution, not the individual. If the policies are unfair, you don’t have much hope. We are a recognised trade union, and the university has to negotiate these policies with us before adopting them. We are able to use our experience of casework to develop policies which work for both university and staff. Our effectiveness depends on how seriously we are taken by the university; we have far more influence when we have a high membership. Indeed, for matters affecting only level seven staff (Professors, etc.), we are not yet recognised and the university declines formal negotiation. So, if you join as soon as you arrive here, you are helping to protect yourself from policies that might later be used against you.

Finally, we negotiate, and occasionally go into national dispute, over pay and pensions. We improved the employers offers on each in the last round of changes. The current round of pay negotiations is under way and pensions are again under threat. We need your support now.

Join here.
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† See Struck Out, by David Renton.

Denis Nicole

Flexible retirement: get it while you still can

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I wrote about flexible retirement a while back. Several of us have been able to take an 80% flex, and collect our USS pension, without difficulty over the past couple of years. It seems that now, however, management attitudes are starting to harden. We have heard rumours that Welsh universities have been denying flexible retirement; now we have an example of Southampton making it more difficult than it should be. Guidelines† have been circulated in FPSE that

FEG would expect staff with no research funding to retain teaching commitment

In other words, however much you retire, you will still be doing a full FTE of teaching. I think that is unreasonable. And surely it is research quality, not funding, that should drive decisions? The guidance also carries the unsavoury implication that teaching is an activity which colleagues have to be pressured into doing; how will that benefit students or deliver better NSS scores?

If you are thinking about flexing, it would a be good idea get in touch with the union before starting negotiations.

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† I love this term. It seems that, whenever the university wants to create policies without bothering to negotiate with the recognised trade unions, they call them “guidelines”.

Denis Nicole

Pay Claim Consultation

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The employers have made a “final” offer of a 1% pay rise from August 2015. UCU is conducting a consultative ballot of our membership to find out if we are willing to engage in industrial action to improve the offer. There is some further information here:

and the recommendation from the UCU HE Conference is that we should reject the offer. As I understand it, the core offer is a 1% pay rise. This roughly matches RPI inflation (1.1% in March) and might at first sight look reasonable. Changes to USS (up 0.5%) and NI (up 1.4% on roughly £40,000 of pay because of the end to the opting out discount) contributions mean that our take-home cash will actually be reduced. Allowing for inflation, the value of our pay would fall rather more than 1%.

Our recent industrial actions over pay and pensions have been to some extent successful. In both cases, the employers improved their offer once the action had started. I imagine that well-supported industrial action might improve this offer to maybe 2%, and allow us to stand still in real terms. Currently, the employers can afford it. And our VCs are seeing much larger pay rises.

There are a few extra features to the offer:

  • For most institutions, the lowest paid will receive an additional boost so they all earn a living wage. Not, however, Southampton as our lowest paid have to work a 36-hour week to earn what should be a 35-hour living wage.
  • The employers have backed away from insistence on performance-related pay. Incremental progression within a grade should continue to be routine.
  • The employers showed no enthusiasm for addressing the gender pay gap in the sector.

PLEASE, PLEASE DO VOTE IN THE BALLOT. It’s painless, and a low turnout would make us very weak in negotiations. Here at Southampton, the UCU Committee is unenthusiastic about most sorts of action short of a strike. Often, our management seems not to even notice we are doing it. Examination boycotts have been effective but, at any given time, the burden falls on a small fraction of our membership; boycotts also tend to upset students who should be our natural supporters.

For what it’s worth, I am going to vote for strike action but against action short of a strike.

PLEASE VOTE, BUT ONLY SUPPORT ASOS OR STRIKES IF YOU YOURSELF ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO TAKE PART IF CALLED UPON. We cannot win an industrial action without solid support; voting for action which we do not deliver would just make us look weak. The employers would laugh at us. And next year’s offer would be even worse.

If you are having trouble finding your ballot Email, it looked like this

Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2015 11:29:59 -0400
From: “University and College Union (UCU)” <reply@ucu.org.uk>
To: dan@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Subject: UCU consultative ballot: higher education (HE) employers’ final offer 2015-16

and the voting link was at the bottom of quite a long message. Several members have reported that their Email system incorrectly marked it as spam.

Denis Nicole

Branch President

Things an individual can do to maximise their pension

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The new changes to our USS pension are very unattractive. There are, however, several things you can do to improve your position at retirement. Here are the ones of which I am aware:

  • Get into a scheme with better inflation protection. The TPS pension, offered by Post-92 Universities has inflation protection at CPI+1.6%; this roughly keeps up with average pay. Currently (but not for long) USS is in the Public Sector Transfer Arrangements, which allow you to transfer your existing USS pension rights into TPS or, for example, the NHS scheme. As shown in my previous post, this really protects your benefits. The downside is that you will probably have to change jobs. I guess you could, for example, move to Solent.
  • Retire a bit. If you were employed and at least 55 on 1st October 2011, you can retire at 60 without penalty. This is a big deal; if you didn’t meet the age cut-off, your pension would be reduced by about 20% for the rest of your life. The really attractive thing to do is to retire 20% (go to a four-day week and, like me, don’t come in on Fridays) and collect 80% of the pension. If you’ve been here a while, you will find that your overall pay goes up, while you work shorter hours. You continue to accrue pension (at 8/10 rate) and when you finally retire you can collect this and your remaining 20%. An added advantage is that your pension is calculated not on your last year’s pay, but on the best three of your last thirteen years, corrected for inflation. If you’ve been at the top of a scale for a while, your pay has not been keeping up with inflation and you will have a pensionable salary which is more than you have ever earned. An unmissable deal.
  • Pay cash AVCs. The Prudential AVCs give a reasonable return but that’s not the real point. They are a way of deferring and eliminating income tax. Money you pay in is paid before tax. You can later take out 25% of the cash value of your pension tax-free. You can take all the rest out too (there is no longer an annuity obligation) and pay tax only at your post-retirement tax rate. Even better, if you have a retirement pension, the total value of your pot is calculated as twenty times your pension plus all the cash (AVCs and USS lump sum); you can take up to 25% of this entire pot tax-free. This right will be lost for future AVCs after April 2016. You should set up AVCs before collecting any pension; the government doesn’t like to see pension money recycled.
  • Don’t forget the various bits of state pension and any other occupational pensions you may have.
  • You don’t ever have to retire. Keep your job as long as you want, and can do, it.
  • Get married to somebody young. USS will pay them for life after you die. Kids (potentially up to age 23) get paid too.

There are a couple of other important benefits which I hope will not affect you.

  • Ill health retirement. If you think this might affect you, do not resign. It is a complicated matter and you need UCU and USS advice before taking any action. If you have only a small pension, your family will be much better off if you stay employed and die “in service”. Resignation also seriously harms your chances of getting an enhanced pension through ill health retirement.
  • You should fill out the “nomination” form from USS. This will ensure that, in the event of your death, your dependent will get some money right away. If you don’t, there will likely be a delay and they might have to pay probate costs before receiving anything.

Denis Nicole

USS Pension Consultation

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The formal USS consultation on the revised pension closes in two days time this Friday. Please take advantage of your opportunity to respond. They don’t make it easy (they wouldn’t, would they); you need your USS member number and your National Insurance Number. You will be able to find your member number on any official USS correspondence, including the invitation to respond, or you can call University extension 22445 and ask. You then go to this web page (https://www.ussconsultation.co.uk/members/sign_in) and sign in. Realistically, comments at this formal stage can only affect details of the proposed scheme; we have already reached (reluctant) agreement about the core of the changes.

I’d caution you about using the various benefit calculators; I have seen three (UCU, UCEA, USS) and they all make different fragile assumptions.

The hard core of what has been imposed on us is the  inadequate inflation protection. They call it USS inflation and it is slightly worse than CPI (with restrictions above 5%). The graph below should explain the problem. It’s based on ONS figures and only goes back to 1989, as that’s the first date of official CPI numbers.
USS_inflationClick on it if you need a bigger version.

You can see the problem at a glance. If we had no career advancement and no annual increments, we would expect our pay to rise at the same rate as average annual pay in the UK. Thus even without annual increments or promotion, we would expect the 1/80th of a £20,000 salary that we earned in 1989 to be worth £650 if it were based on final salary, as average pay has multiplied by a factor of 2.6 over the period. In contrast, USS inflation (capped CPI) has only multiplied by a factor of 1.88 over the period, so even with the improved 1/75 accrual rate, you only get a pension of £501 twenty-five years later. You lose even without taking account of career progression. The teachers, in TPS, have negotiated inflation protection of CPI+1.6%; this roughly keeps up with average pay.

Why did the teachers get a better deal? Perhaps because of greater Union strength and militancy. The sad reality is that our scheme is supposed to be fully funded; there is meant to be enough money in it to pay our pensions. That allows the government pensions regulator, the USS staff, and the USS trustees (typically from the banking and government sectors) to impose very conservative actuarial assumption to force down benefits. They have even adopted de-risking which is banking-talk for deliberately selecting worse-performing investments which make the deficit bigger. And they have imposed a defined contribution section because, in their language, it is risk-free. It’s risk-free because we take all the risk. The teacher’s scheme, on the other hand, has no money at all, so they don’t have any actuarial rules to follow.

So what can you usefully say in your response? Feel free to rehearse the sad story above, but I doubt you’ll get far. I would concentrate on the defined contribution component, and address a couple of key issues:

  • The new USS is a very complex hybrid scheme. There is legacy final salary, legacy added years AVC, Prudential AVC, CRB, DB (with optional extra matched and unmatched contributions) and possibly a further cash purchase AVC option. This all gives the scheme staff an opportunity to spend money and impose fees. Insist that the fees on the DB parts of the scheme be kept low, well below the current 0.84% average as we are a very big scheme which should be very efficient.
  • All the risk in the DB part is carried by us, the members. So we (not the trustees) should be able to select the range of investment vehicles on offer. A member-led panel should be created for the purpose. We are likely to want various sorts of ethical and low-fees funds.

Here are some other suggested responses:

Denis Nicole

University of Southampton refuses requests for information on V-C pay and perks

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Colleagues may be interested to read this press release that was issued by UCU on 4 March 2015

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The University of Southampton has refused to answer basic questions about its vice-chancellor’s pay and perks, according to a new report released today (Wednesday).

The University and College Union (UCU) issued a series of FOI requests in order to try and learn more about the shadowy world of senior pay and perks in UK universities. The union contacted 155 institutions and the University of Southampton was one of only seven that didn’t respond*.

However, the university’s accounts show that Professor Don Nutbeam was the 23rd most highly paid UK university vice-chancellor in 2013/14. He received £320,000, which put him comfortably above the average vice-chancellor’s pay of £260,290.

The union’s report detailed university bosses spending up to £60,000 a year on luxury air fares and heads of institutions racking up hefty hotel bills and annual expenses. But no expenditure figures were received from the University of Southampton.

In an attempt to obtain more details of the rationale for senior salaries, UCU also requested a copy of the most recently ratified minutes of the remuneration committee – the committee tasked with determining the pay of the vice-chancellor. The University of Southampton also failed to provide a copy of its remuneration committee minutes.

UCU regional official, Moray McAulay, said: ‘The University of Southampton is one of only a few universities in the UK that did not provide any of the information we requested making it one of our most secretive. You do have to wonder what it is they want to hide.

‘Overall, it’s a chaotic state of affairs where some institutions are open and honest while others use whatever means they can to avoid revealing information of spending at the top. We need a national system that will bring in obligations for higher education institutions to be transparent about their spending.’ 

ends

 Local contact:

Moray McAulay m: 07766 251 863; e: mmcaulay@ucu.org.uk

National UCU contact:

Vicky Wilks t: 020 7756 2601; m: 07977 562 686; e: vwilks@ucu.org.uk 

www.twitter.com/ucu  

 

UCU Elections

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You should all have received Electoral Reform Services ballots for the UCU elections. It is very important that you vote now; your ballot must be received by this Friday 27th February. There is something of a power-struggle in UCU between the “hard” Left (who seem to be associated with the old Socialist Workers Party) and the “mainstream” (who sometimes call themselves the Independent Broad Left). Currently, the Higher Education Committee and the other principal negotiators are led by the “mainstream” and I personally think they are doing a pretty good job under difficult circumstances. When I vote, I take care not to vote for UCULeft-backed candidates; I think they are divisive and tend to pursue wider political objectives to the detriment of our members’ interests. But that’s just me; you should, of course, make up your own minds. But VOTE. None of us are happy with the USS settlement; it is indeed a worse deal than the one the teachers and post-92’s managed for TPS. This is not, as commonly assumed, because of the accrual rate: our lump sum roughly compensates for their faster accrual. The difference is that the teachers managed to negotiate much better inflation protection. They get CPI+1.6%. We get CPI+0%, subject to some additional caps. We did, however, push the employers further than USS and the Government wanted to go. Getting any more would have required us to force, through industrial action, a government back-down. Could we have done that? I doubt it; our industrial strength is limited. We have four problems:

  • We don’t have enough members. Southampton is one of the bigger branches, but membership is nothing like universal. Could we “bring the University to its knees”?
  • Our members can be reluctant to take action. That’s a pity. Effective industrial action requires a membership who will act as a well-disciplined army; all must be willing to turn action on and off at short notice as required by the ebb and flow of negotiations.
  • Our house is divided; the hard left spends congress sniping at the leadership elected by the majority of members. Congress decreases our credibility amongst employers.
  • Unlike tube train drivers and teachers (parents have to stay home from work), action by university staff does not have an immediate impact on the general population.

The first paragraph might sound a bit hostile to the hard left. I’m particularly cross with them right now as they have exploited UCU’s rules (it only needs twenty branches to call one) to force a Special Sector Conference in Manchester tomorrow, and three of us have to spend the day there to vote against motions criticising our elected leadership. Apart from the public embarrassment—some at USS and EPF must be laughing—our membership fees are being frittered away on travelling expenses, probably about £200 each for 120 delegates, and booking a room at the Britannia Hotel. I’d guess an overall cost around £30,000.

Denis Nicole, Branch VP.